Composition, sound design, live performance and robotic art.

Album Preview in The Wire

Ahead of next month’s Off the Page festival (Bristol, 26-20 September 2014), festival hosts The Wire have run a feature on my work in their September edition. It’s in the shops and available for download now.

I was interviewed by Abi Bliss and we covered a lot of ground – including my time working as an acoustic engineer in my early twenties. Abi is an interesting writer. I loved her article, a few months ago, on the devotion to Derbyshire and Oram by some programmers of electronic music events – programmers who could perhaps be more welcoming to contemporary female performers.

On the magazine’s website this month, you can also hear a few excerpts of my work, including a preview track from Ealing Feeder, my debut solo album which is coming very soon. The Bows is an interpretation of a London folksong, one that’s drifted very far from its moorings. You can read the very strange narrative of the original which inspired this setting here. The page also features a couple of tracks from Down to the Silver Sea, a compilation album curated by Ian Hodgson (Moon Wiring Club), in which I was also in the fine company of Jon Brooks, Paul Snowdon and Martin Jenkins.

Sheep heart amulet (source The Wellcome Collection)

Magazine subscribers can also hear Cow Heart Pin, a second track from the album, on this month’s Below the Radar, a selection of underground music compiled by Daisy Hyde. Cow Heart Pin is inspired by a report in Edward Lovett’s Magic in Modern London (1925). In it, Lovett describes a London dairyman who sticks pins into a desiccated cow’s heart to curse a rival. The song’s lyrics are adapted from some Anglo Saxon cunning magic: a metrical charm to bring back lost cattle.

Thanks to Emma Kilbey for the spoken word in The Bows and David Bramwell of Oddfellows Casino for singing so beautifully in Cow Heart Pin. If you’d like more news of the album Ealing Feeder, do sign up to my mailing list.